Joey's Chapter Summaries
Chapter One The book begins with Piggy and Ralph meeting each other, freshly liberated from a plane that had been shot down. The plane left a "scar" on the island, which is supposed to represent the first instance of man's destruction of the island. Piggy finds a conch shell and tells Ralph how to use it. Ralph uses it, and we meet the rest of the characters. Everyone votes, and Ralph is elected leader. Rules are laid down. As far as they know, they are the only ones on the island, so Jack takes his choirboys and goes hunting. Jack fails to finish off a pig, and says "next time.." which foreshadows his future savagery. Chapter Two The chapter begins with a meeting. The meeting is initially an attempt to organize into groups with different jobs, but soon a littlun brings up the 'beastie', which will be a contantly mentioned enigma in the book. After Ralph assures everyone that there is not, in fact, a beast, Jack and him go to build a fire. They gather sufficient wood and use Piggy's glasses for ignition. The fire starts, but there's not much smoke. The fire sspreads as they argue amongst themselves, and then someone mentions that the boy with the mulberry birthmark has gone missing and everyone realizes they have killed him. Chapter Three The chapter starts with Jack face-to-face with poop. It turns out he's on a hunt, which turned out to be fruitless. He goes to Ralph, who is attempting to build shelters, for water. Ralph tries to convince Jack to help him build the shelters, and the conversation turns to beasties and the fact that Simon is the only one who ever helps Ralph. Ralph and Jack go to bathe amd the narrative cuts to a scene in which simon is walking around, and he gives fruit to some littluns. Then Golding spends a page or two describing the scenery, Chapter Four The boys would spend the day working, eating, and playing. At noon, the sun would be so hot they would hallucinate. The littluns started getting stomach aches and diarrhea from eating too much fruit. Three littluns were making a sandcastle on the beach when two biguns, Roger and Maurice, begin cruelly smashing the sandcastles. Roger even throws rocks at one of the littluns, but intentionally doesn't hit them. Eventually, Roger and Maurice come across Jack, who is painting his face with clay and charcoal to hunt. The other kids seemed to obey not him, but the mask, and they go on a hunt. Ralph and Piggy spotted a ship on the horizon. However, when Ralph looks at the mountain, he ses that the fire has been allowed to go out. Jack and the hunters return, chanting, and Ralph and Piggy tell Jack off for allowing the fire to go out. Jack punches Piggy in the face, breaking his glasses. He apologizes for the fire, but not for his attack on Piggy. He goes to restart the fire, , the hunters re-enact the hunt, and Ralph calls a meeting. Chapter Five Ralph calls a meeting, and begins to question existence ("What is a face? What is anything?). He then gives a speech to everyone about how they've let themselves go and how everything's falling apart. Jack takes the conch and yells at the littluins for being scared of the beast. Piggy takes the conch and suggests that they're scared of themselves. Percival and all the littluns start crying, and Percival says that the beast lives in the water. Everyone argues and theories continue to be proposed. Everyone continues to whine. Chapter Six Samneric find the corpse of a fighter pilot after they wake up and relight the fire that they let go out, so they go and tell Ralph. Ralph and Jack decide to go check the only unexplored spot on the island for the Beast and then go light the fire, but they eat first. They get to the unexplored spot (they call it the Castle) and Ralph finds there is no beast after he checks. Meanwhile, the kids are exploring the area and thinking up ways to build forts. Ralph and Jack (mainly Ralph) discover that the signal fire’s gone out again, leading him to explode at everyone who is “wasting their time” and punch the skin off his knuckles. Jack then leads everyone down the Castle and across the bridge.